Carey McWilliams lived in Echo Park during the 1940s at
2041 Alvarado Street, and owned the property until the 1970s after moving to New York.

Carey McWilliams:

Local Hero, American Prohphet

By Peter Richardson

Kevin Starr has called Carey
McWilliams “the single finest nonfiction writer on California—ever,” yetmany readers are unfamiliar with his life and work. A Los Angeles author, attorney,
and editor of The Nationfrom 1955
to 1975, McWilliams wrote nine first-rate books and over 200 articles between 1939 and 1950alone. On his favorite topics—farm labor, race and ethnicity, California politics and culture,
and McCarthyism—McWilliams remains unsurpassed.

His influence runs deep
but is now largely invisible. Robert Towne’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Chinatown
was inspired by a book McWilliams wrote in 1946. César Chávez said he learned most of what he knew about California agribusiness
from McWilliams. Luis Valdez’s Zoot Suit owes a good deal to McWilliams’s
writing and advocacy. Hunter S. Thompson credited Hell’s Angels, his first
bestseller, to McWilliams. Mike Davis has sung his praises, and McWilliams’s reputation among writers, journalists,
and academics continues to rise over a quarter century after his death.

Born in 1905, McWilliams
came to Los Angeles after his father, a prosperous Colorado rancher and state legislator, lost his fortune and committed suicide
shortly after World War I. He worked at the Los Angeles Times in the credit department
and attended USC, where he wrote for the school paper as well as the campus literary and humor journals. After completing
a law degree, McWilliams became a proficient litigator at a downtown law firm. He also wrote literary reviews for local magazines
and soon became a kind of regional tastemaker. At the tender age of 23, he completed his first book, a well-received biography
of the Western journalist Ambrose Bierce.

A Radicalized
McWilliams

The 1930s radicalized McWilliams.
As a lawyer, he represented farm workers in and around Los Angeles, and he wrote his first bestseller, Factories in the Field, in 1939—the same year John Steinbeck’s TheGrapes of Wrath became a hugely successful novel. That year, too, he was appointed
chief of California’s Division of Immigration and Housing. His work there made him a high-profile target for California
growers, who called him “Agricultural Pest Number One, worse than pear blight or boll weevils.” His other adversaries
included Earl Warren, who promised that his first official act as governor would be to fire McWilliams; J. Edgar Hoover, who
considered him for detention in case of a national emergency; and state legislators such as Jack Tenney and Sam Yorty, who
grilled him about his links to the Communist Party. (He wasn’t a member of the Party, but he had many friends and colleagues
who were, and he never hesitated to work with them when they agreed on an issue.)

Throughout the 1940s, McWilliams
also worked on a broad range of civic issues. In 1943, scuffles in downtown Los Angeles between Latinos and sailors spun out
of control and led to the Zoot Suit Riots. McWilliams covered the mayhem for various publications, called for a federal investigation
of the Los Angeles Police Department, and used his influence to suggest a gubernatorial commission to calm the city. Governor
Warren formed the commission, the Navy suspended shore leave, and the troubles subsided.

During this time, too, McWilliams
chaired a committee to appeal the Sleepy Lagoon murder convictions, which sent a group of mostly Latino youths to San Quentin
after a biased trial. Their successful appeal was widely regarded as the beginning of the Chicano movement. A few years later,
McWilliams wrote North from Mexico, the first such history of the Spanish-speaking
people in the Southwest. By the 1970s, some people were calling McWilliams the Grandfather of Chicano studies.

Challenging
the Internment Camps

In 1944, McWilliams turned to
another urgent issue—the evacuation and internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans. He wrote Prejudice, which demolished every argument for the camps. That same year, one Supreme Court justice repeatedly
cited Prejudice in his dissenting opinion to the decision that upheld the constitutionality
of the internment.

Several years later, McWilliams
helped defend the so-called Hollywood Ten after the House Committee on Un-American Activities summoned a group of film industry
leftists to Washington for questioning about their political associations. The witnesses declined to answer questions about
Communist Party membership and were convicted of contempt of Congress. McWilliams drafted an amicus brief for the Supreme Court appeal, and although the Court decided not to hear the case, it later accepted
the argument he offered in his brief.

In 1951, McWilliams moved to
New York to edit The Nation. His stands on McCarthyism, civil rights, and Vietnam
eventually earned him a reputation in progressive circles for being right on the big issues. He was also known for reactivating
the American tradition of muckraking, converting what had been known as a journal of opinion into a forum for investigative
reporting. Along the way, he gave many young people their start by publishing them in The
Nation. That group included Ralph Nader, Howard Zinn, and Hunter S. Thompson.

In American Prophet, I argue that McWilliams was the nation’s most versatile public intellectual of the 20th century. This strong claim is easy to test. Imagine Cornel West writing a Supreme
Court brief, Alan Dershowitz editing a weekly magazine, Noam Chomsky critiquing Yeats’s poetry, or Gore Vidal running
a state agency, and you’ll begin to appreciate McWilliams’s most extraordinary gift.

A few years ago, author Gray
Brechin described what it was like to read Carey McWilliams now: “For those of us who lean unapologetically to the left
as it flows ever farther to the right, encountering the writings of Carey McWilliams is like
running into an old friend in a foreign city." It’s a fitting tribute to a major American writer and public figure.

Peter Richardson is the author of American Prophet: The Life and Work of Carey McWilliams (University
of Michigan Press, 2005).